Let me finish tonight with this.
I want President Obama to focus on something between now and November. What I’d like him to do is speak simply and clearly to this country about what he’s accomplished.
Remember Denzel Washington in the movie Philadelphia? He played the lawyer who told prospective clients to “explain this to me like I’m a two year old.” Well, I know what that means — no fancy words, no jargon, no language that shows how smart you are: just clear and basic and real.
Obama rescued the American car industry. We’re back. What we were proud of, excited by as kids, we’ve gotten back. And the biggest reason is, this president did what was necessary. He rescued the industry! It wasn’t a bailout; it was a rescue. So call it that. We, this country, rescued our auto industry!
We did it by using the smartest, most state-of-the-art thinking of our great universities — stuff that Nobel Prize winners like Paul Krugman teach. We saw the huge drop-in consumption, a huge pullback in investment, and we, the American people, countered it with a giant commitment in public investment — that jobs act of 2009 — just when we needed it to prevent a second Great Depression. Third, that health care bill. We, as a country, faced up, for the first time, to our duty. We agreed that every American has to take personal and family responsibility for their health needs. We agreed as a country to meet our duty on health to the millions who rely on emergency rooms. We agreed that every American should meet their own health duty — not to dump the cost on someone else. It’s the President’s duty now to tell people, this country’s middle class that has health insurance and people that have health challenges, how this act will make things better for them. He needs to sell his auto rescue plan, his jobs act, his health care act as if he were talking to a two year old. He can do it.
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